Walt Disney’s $5.5bn park to win over customers
WALT Disney’s new park in China will offer Jet Packs, a rafting adventure, rides on a Tron-themed Lightcycle and the largest parade in any of its resorts, all aimed at winning over Chinese customers.
The Shanghai park, scheduled to open next spring, includes six themed lands such as Mickey Avenue and Tomorrowland, and an area where visitors can interact with characters from the Star Wars and Marvel movies. They were unveiled yesterday at a media conference in Shanghai.
Disney’s first resort in the Chinese mainland “celebrates and embraces China’s incredibly rich heritage”, chairman and chief executive Robert Iger said. It was meant to “delight and entertain the people of China for generations to come”, he said.
The $5.5 billion (R68.2bn) Disney Shanghai Resort, which the company is building with local partners, is served by two hotels – Shanghai Disneyland Hotel and Toy Story Hotel. The project is Disney’s largest foreign investment and a big bet on the growth of middle-class consumers in the world’s most-populous country.
Under a strategy Iger calls “authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese”, the world’s largest entertainment firm is trying to include as much local content as possible to appeal to Chinese consumers and avoid complaints of cultural imperialism that greeted its resort in France. The park, which Disney began building in April 2011, is located in the Pudong district of Shanghai, China’s wealthiest metropolis. It is the centrepiece of a 20km2 tourism and resorts zone, adjacent to Pudong International Airport.
Disney is opening the resort in the face of an economic slowdown in China. The world’s largest themepark operator will also have to deal with increased competition, including a Universal Studios theme park being built in Beijing, and a studio and entertainment centre in Shanghai from DreamWorks Animation SKG.
The company also operates a Disneyland Resort in Hong Kong, opened in 2005.
Disney would keep developing both the Hong Kong and Shanghai resorts as it wanted them to stay relevant, Bob Weis, the executive vice-president of Walt Disney Imagineering, the unit responsible for content creation for the resorts, said. – Bloomberg